About the Program
As a hub of learning, teaching, and thinking among a community of formerly incarcerated people in New York City, the Harlem Microcollege provides a broad foundational education for students who aspire to careers in advocacy or lives of robust civic agency.
Arts, Sciences, and Advocacy
At the Bard Microcollege for Just Community Leadership, advocacy and leadership development are at the heart of the curriculum. Effective advocacy for social change requires a grounding in the complex systems–historical, anthropological, political–that bring about injustice. Thus, students at the Harlem Microcollege can expect to explore the history of labor struggles and civil rights movements, critical race theory, economic theory, and the sociology of mass incarceration.
At the same time, Bard College does not view the arts or humanities as luxuries. The college fervently believes that all students, even passionate activists and those focused on advancing their careers, have the right to study a broad range of disciplines, and to follow their personal curiosity into fields they may not have known they would love. In many ways that freedom is the meaning of the liberal arts (liberal, from the Latin liber, meaning “free”), and it should not be the province of a privileged few.
Therefore, students at the Harlem Microcollege study everything college students study at liberal arts institutions the world over: literature, philosophy, anthropology, art, science, writing, mathematics, sociology, economics, history, and more.
Bard Microcollege for Just Community Leadership courses include:
- The Making of the Carceral State
- The Sound and Texture of Voice
- Performing Protest in Brazil 1964-2024
- Statistics and Quantitative Reasoning
- Forms of Autobiography, Shapes of Revolution
- Sustainability, Diversity, and Inclusion
- Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
- Beauty and Thievery in the Modern Museum
- Black Political Thought
- Bioethics
- Globalization and Working Lives
- Translating and Interpreting Asylum
- The Global Novel
- Writing From/For Inheritance
- Poetics of Resistance
- Afrofuturism
More about The Harlem Microcollege Partners
In a crucial moment for criminal justice reform, the Bard Microcollege For Just Community Leadership deploys the expertise and resources of three leading institutions in a community-based setting to cultivate leaders, decision-makers, and advocates of the future.
Just Leadership USA
JustLeadershipUSA, a national non-profit, is led by directly impacted people and is dedicated to decarcerating the United States by educating, elevating and empowering the people and communities most impacted by systemic racism to drive, amplify, and sustain the kinds of policy reform that builds thriving, sustainable and healthy communities. We amplify the power of directly impacted people by investing in their voices, so they have the tools and resources to self-organize and advocate for themselves and their families. Together we build an equitable, fair, and just U.S.
College & Community Fellowship
Founded in 2000, College & Community Fellowship (CCF) envisions a world where all people, regardless of criminal justice histories, have equitable access to opportunity. As one of the first organizations to focus on access to higher education for justice-involved women, CCF fills a unique niche in supporting women while they obtain college degrees and leadership skills that promote long-term self-efficacy and civic engagement. With work grounded in racial, gender, and economic justice through partnerships in the academic, policy, government, and grassroots activism communities, CCF invests in access to opportunity for those most harmed by mass criminalization.
Bard Prison Initiative
Since 1999, the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) has been a national leader in restoring and expanding college opportunity to incarcerated people nationwide. Nationally, BPI has cultivated over a dozen other college-in-prison programs through the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison; it is well known for its Debate Union’s competitions against Morehouse College, the West Point Academy and Harvard, and Cambridge Universities, as well as the PBS docu-series College Behind Bars, directed by Lynn Novick and executive produced by Ken Burns.
In 2016, BPI expanded its work redefining the place of higher education to enroll traditionally excluded students in community-based settings.